WHAT HAS DARPA EVER DONE FOR US?
“DARPA was created
when Sputnik went up,”
says Crocker. “The US
government got caught flat-
footed in its space program
and the agency was created
to prevent technological
surprises. The first thing
it did was to gather the
pieces of the space program
together and then NASA was
spun out of that.”
It was an exciting start
for the agency responsible
for developing emerging
technologies for use by the
military, and its $520 million
budget in 1958 ($3.427
billion in 2019) reflects this.
Essentially, it takes new
ideas, shakes them, sees
what military applications
drop out, then invests in
making these happen. As
a side-effect, interesting
civilian and medical
applications of technology
tend to get discovered too.
Take GPS and weather
satellites. Both developed
with DARPA investment to
make it easier for tanks to
roll across the Cold War
battlefields of easternEurope but now making it
possible to avoid the traffic
tailbacks at the mall.
Then there’s the PC, surely
the apogee of the interactive
computing doctrine of ARPA.
As the architect of the LINC
at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, the
first minicomputer and
the forerunner of the PC,
physicist Wesley Clark is one
of the fathers of the personal
computer and also the man
who suggested ARPANET use
separate routers from the
mainframes it was linking.
The LINC was a 12-bit
transistor-based computer
designed for researchers
at the National Institutes of
Health in 1962. Its display
was a pair of oscilloscopes,
each about 5-inch square. It
could be programmed with
a keyboard and a control
panel full of knobs and
switches, it cost $40,000 and
shipped around 50 units. The
designation ‘minicomputer’
merely meant it was
smaller and cheaper than a
mainframe, and the LINC was
housed in a wooden cabinet
six feet tall and 20 inchesacross. It contained a 400kb
rewritable tape drive and
displayed characters on its
screens using a 4x6 matrix
of pixels—one of the lowest
resolution character sets
designed.
DARPA is also involved in
the fight against Covid-19.
The agency began investing
in nucleic acid vaccines back
in 2011. Instead of delivering
a dead or weakened form of
a pathogen to the body, thesevaccines deliver the genes
that can make an antigen,
triggering a protective
immune response. In 2016,
its Pandemic Prevention
Platform program was
looking into producing
antibodies against diseases
such as influenza, Zika, and
MERS, meaning it could pivot
easily to Covid. The fruits
of its labor eventually came
to market as the vaccine
developed by Moderna.and university staff, the combination of NSFNET and ARPANET
becoming known as ‘the Internet’.
Gradually, ARPANET was replaced and left obsolete, with
NSFNET faster and more dominant in every way. ARPANET was
decommissioned in 1990, its IMPs and TIPs phased out by July
that year, and its traffic moved to NSFNET. A year later, Senator
Al Gore’s High-Performance Computing and Communication
Act was passed, based on a proposal by Leonard Kleinrock that
suggested the building of the networks, services, hardware, and
software required to make vast amounts of digital information
available to anyone. The ‘information superhighway’ championed
by Gore who, despite a tendency to be overly enthusiastic and
struggle to explain things, had been involved with computers
since the late 1970s, sounded much like the World Wide Web and
digital commerce/streaming services we know today.
“If you look at the genesis of networking,” says Kahn, “it
started with the ARPANET but broke out into multiple network
environments with the introduction of the packet radio net and the
packet satellite net, which used Intelsat IV [1970s geostationary
communications satellites]. Suffice to say, the ARPANET is
gone, but what remains are the notions of packet-switching
and rapid interactive networking. It fundamentally affected the
communications industry, because the economics of fiber across
the Atlantic offered an alternative to Intelsat. The packet radio net
morphed into today’s ground-based wireless systems.“The technology evolved to become the internet we have
today in large part due to the social structures that we put in
place which were needed to allow the network to evolve. It’s not
enough to build a piece of technology and put it out there when
the technology itself is evolving so rapidly. You need a way of
constantly augmenting, improving, expanding, and increasing it,”
Kahn continues.
“When I was in DARPA, and we were going down the internet
path, I remember thinking then that we needed the community
more involved, so I signed the paperwork to form the Internet
Society and Vint Cerf became its first president. I was named
head of ICANN [a non-profit organization set up to ensure the
stable and secure operation of the internet] for a while, as was
Steve Crocker later on. All those social structures were, and are,
as essential to the internet as the technology.”
ARPANET leaves one more ripple in the enormous pond that
is today’s internet, the .arpa top-level domain, now reserved for
technical infrastructure purposes, although a ‘backronym’ has
since been created for it—the Address and Routing Parameter
Area. Originally a temporary domain for naming ARPANET
computers, it ended up being too difficult to remove, and so it
remains today. You can’t register a domain there, and it mainly
fulfills functions related to reverse IP address lookup, domain
mapping, or DNS. However, it’s a little bit of the internet’s history,
hidden in plain sight.A mock up of the Sputnik satellite with the case opened. This
was the first man-made object launched into earth’s orbit.APR 2022MAXIMU MPC 45
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